1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the gathering and compilation of data for market research purposes and, more particularly, to the gathering of point-of-sale transaction data for market research purposes.
2. Background Description
Retail enterprises utilize targeted marketing to optimize marketing expense versus revenue (purchase) response. For example, retail marketers may use transaction-related demographic data to construct customer-centric historical transactions that tie in past promotions, purchases, and census demographics to build response models for revenue, profit, delinquency, and other factors. Such response models may be employed to manage ongoing and future marketing campaigns. These models are most commonly employed in connection with retail distribution channels where individual customers can be fully identified, such as direct mail and Internet commerce, because the models require historical data identifying particular customers to particular transactions.
Because of the need for transaction-related data, response models are not typically employed in the most pervasive and widely used retail channel—the retail store. In a retail store environment:                The customer base tends to be largely unknown;        Shoppers typically make purchases using payment media, such as cash or credit cards, which do not provide demographic data; and        Outside of a few segments such as grocery retailing, retail loyalty programs do not have large-scale subscription or usage.Various other factors may also impede the collection of transaction-related demographic data in a retail environment. The fact that a shopper may walk through a store without making a purchase, even while dwelling in certain areas more than others, makes demographic data on overall customer traffic an ineffective substitute for demographic data that has been correlated to transaction data.        
Thus, the present invention recognizes the problem that, without the capability to obtain transaction-related demographic data, it is next to impossible to use response modeling or other data analytic techniques to increase the effectiveness of targeted marketing in a retail store environment.